This is...maddening. During a training session, I had
the trainer run through a set of procedures while Captivate ran in
the background. I stopped the recording during breaks so the file
wouldn't be of a ridiculous size. The first time I stopped
Captivate, it converted 54 files to swf just fine and generated the
file. Great. I closed the project and started recording again -
this time, when I stopped Captivate, the poor thing had to convert
183 files to swf - took a while, but it finished that, then the
next dialog came up, and then it just - stopped. It never generated
the file. It never threw an error. It didn't stop responding. It
just never gave me my movie/thumbnails. Was it too big? Can my
files be recovered? Was it something I said? I am seriously hoping
this is just a stupid noob problem and someone somewhere will take
pity on me - I need to know WHAT HAPPENED????? Thanks all!

First off, you should be aware that Captivate is "event
driven". This means it takes screen shots where it sees different
actions occurring. So unless you simply turned on full motion
capture and let it run, it won't fill up your hard drive.

Secondly, you probably hit a limit. Typically, we don't like
to see Captivate movies beyond 50-65 slides or so. This depends on
a number of factors, but 50-65 seems to be the "sweet spot".

Thirdly, where did you try and save the file? Local C drive
or on a network. If you say "on a network", you should know that
Captivate has frequent corruption issues when you place a file on a
network drive and edit it from there.

Sorry, but if it's corrupt, odds of recovery are slim at
best. You MIGHT have luck creating a new, blank movie and importing
from the errant movie into the new one. But even this only works
maybe 5% of the time (if that).